Bayanihan (pronounced as ) is a Filipino
term taken from the word bayan, referring to a nation, town or
community. The whole term bayanihan refers to a spirit of communal
unity or effort to achieve a particular objective.

Etymology

The origin of the term bayanihan can be traced
from a common tradition in Philippine
towns where community members volunteer to help a family move to a
new place. The process involves literally carrying the house to its
new location. This is done by putting bamboo poles forming a strong
frame to lift the stilts from the ground and carrying the whole
house with the men positioned at the ends of each pole. A mural by
Filipino National Artist Carlos "Botong" Francisco and painting by
Joselito E. Barcelona illustrates the whole process. The tradition
also features a small fiesta hosted by the family to
express gratitude to the volunteers.

Usage

In society, bayanihan has also been adopted as a
term to refer to a local civil effort to resolve national
issues.

In teamwork, one of the first groups to use the
term is a world acclaimed dance group (Bayanihan
Dance Company) which travels different countries to perform the
various traditional folk dances of the country with the objective
of promoting Philippine culture.

In computing, the term bayanihan has evolved into
many different meanings and incorporated as codenames to projects which
depict the spirit of cooperative effort involving a community of
members. An example of these projects is the Bayanihan
Linux project which is a Filipino based desktop focused
Linux
distribution.

See also

External links

Project
Bayanihan is a project started at MIT Laboratory for Computer
Science in 1996 to "explore and
develop the idea of volunteer computing, which enables people to
join a large parallel
computation by simply visiting a Web site with an appropriate
browser".